1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to games, and in particular to games involving word groupings, sentences, and group composition of short stories.
2 Prior Art
For as long as the field of writing has existed, professional and amateur writers have had a need to find new ways to stimulate their own creativity. The problem has always been to do so in a way which would be exciting to the participant as well as inject a healthy amount of competitiveness during any such exercise.
One of the most innovative ways to stimulate that creativity, to promote ideas, and encourage practice of the art of writing is through the use of a game. This invention, through the use of participatory group writing and random character selection, provides all the prerequisites for producing such creativity enhancement.
Other games have attempted to promote the use and the building of language. These attempts, such as disclosed in LeCapelain U.S. Pat. No. 4,470,821, rely mostly on the very rudiments of word structure. The emphasis in the aforementioned patent is on grammatically correct sentence structure only. Much of the prior art builds upon the individual components of the alphabet to form words. The Lewis U.S. Pat. No. 4,741,538 is a typical example of creating individual words by adding letters to other letters. This is a common theme of many related game patents.
There are also other patents of reference such as the Kritzberg U.S. Pat. No. 3,891,209, which involves a random selection of stimulii in the form of individual words to promote storytelling as an aid for psychological testing. However, there is no provision in the Kritzberg patent for group writing or composition. Nor does the Kritzberg patent allow for random creation of individual characters to be used in the writing process.
Other patents of interest would be U.S. Pat. Nos.
3,116,927--Kuhlman issued--January 1964 PA0 4,132,406--Ginsberg issued--January 1979
Again, these patents involve the adding together of letters to form words, or the adding of words to form short sentences for the purposes of promoting word formations and proper sentence structures. All of the previously mentioned patents are useful, but none are useful in promoting the art of short story compostiion.
I am totally unaware of any other games which aid and promote short-story writing, or group composition of any kind.